At the Warpstock Europe 2018 live stream I saw an Alex Taylor presentation about translating ArcaOS to local languages. In short Alex said which languages version of OS/2 Arca Noae has and which are missing. Arca Noae also opened the door for the community to help with translation and said that the translation made by the contributors will be part of the open source projects (like XWorkplace).

The video replay is not available yet, and I will like to see if I can translate some parts of ArcaOS to spanish, but I forgot which was the Arca Noae email to contact them and ask for instructions. Do you have it around? I also want to see how Arca Noae has organized the components that requires translation for ArcaOS to see where I should start.

I encourage everyone who is interested in an ArcaOS version in his language to volunteer to help translating! From what I can see (I am not speaking for Arca Noae, just a translator myself) the number of translators is quite limited at the moment.

I have interest to know the procedure or how the translation process is organized. I think if it will be public it will be easier for people to collaborate (maybe it is on the public Arca Noae wiki and I haven't found it yet).

I registered to the AN Translation team. Lewis just game the access to the mailing list and welcome the new guys.

I can say that they have created an interesting organization system to follow the translations with their Mantis tickets. I initially think I kind of understand how things are organized, but I will like to coordinate first with other spanish translator to do some trial and error and see if I'm translating some files in a correct way.

For example I need to validate if I'm saving the txt files in a correct way for the special characters and what kind of expressions should be use (third person, formal or informal spanish).

For example I need to validate if I'm saving the txt files in a correct way for the special characters

If I understand you correctly, that might depend on your text editor. A newer Notepad would probably be the worst one for translating OS/2 files, because of its UTF-16 LE encoding. ;-)

E.g., MED and EPM/NEPMD work well. But also AE.exe works (available as E.exe replacement). Just use the correct system codepage. That might be 850 in the case of Spanish. The used font should have all the special chars. I prefer System VIO 16x8. That works well with Western European languages. (For other codepages and other fonts, the Java editor Jedit might be a better choice.)

Word lists, as being used bei IBM's Translation Manager/2. I would contact Jacques van Leeuwen for that. He's on the translation list.

Standard: IBM's Common User Access 91 (also part of TM/2, as I can remember)

Standard: Spanish spelling

Already translated texts, esp. by other people

And in that order, preferably. Using e.g. HELP to find a typical IBM-word hardly slows you down. If you were using OS/2 in the past, then you'll still be able to recognize or miss those alternative words without having to actually install an old version.

About the Spanish translation of ArcaOS, Alfred is doing a great job and he has more experience using OS/2 in Spanish. I'm just trying to assist him while I also learn the process.

From my side I need to practice a little bit how to create the .inf files so I can review the .ipf translation on the help file.

There are things that I dislike about the translation, but that is because of the age of the platform and that some components has different ways to get translated than others.

One thing is the code page. I'm using 850 for Spanish and I know it works fine, but it is old. I know the modern standard is Unicode but I don't know all the effort it can be to support Unicode on the OS/2 platform for translations. Maybe someone with more experience can explain me that or give their personal opinion.

The other thing is that each component has a different way to be translated, which is logical because some components were made by different developers and maybe with different standards. I would like to hear opinions and maybe see some samples of which is a program that made a good standard for translations. Which do you think is a good reference app that supports translations ?

From my side I need to practice a little bit how to create the .inf files so I can review the .ipf translation on the help file.

The IPF compiler ipfc.exe plus its files have to be installed. Therefore install any toolkit (best is the last). The IPF language is described in book\ipfref.inf.

I don't like editing IPF directly, as Alex does it. I always use a preprocessor that eases the work for me extremely. Others might have other opinions. As the co-author of HyperText/2 and the author of the compiler back from IPF to HTEXT, I always use that tool for .INF or .HLP file creation.

There are things that I dislike about the translation, but that is because of the age of the platform and that some components has different ways to get translated than others.

BTW: I don't like that the installer has repeated text strings, that have to be maintained separately, also for translation. Joachim finally had reduced that enormously in the last eCS, but now the same error was made again.

One thing is the code page. I'm using 850 for Spanish and I know it works fine, but it is old. I know the modern standard is Unicode but I don't know all the effort it can be to support Unicode on the OS/2 platform for translations. Maybe someone with more experience can explain me that or give their personal opinion.

Most OS/2 apps, especially system apps, can't handle Unicode. Newer OS/2 versions have functions for that, but OS/2 will never work with Unicode without a major rewrite of its tools (without having the sources).

The other thing is that each component has a different way to be translated, which is logical because some components were made by different developers and maybe with different standards. I would like to hear opinions and maybe see some samples of which is a program that made a good standard for translations. Which do you think is a good reference app that supports translations ?

That may be interesting for discussion, but most sources are not available. We can be lucky, that .MSG files can be exchanged and resources of the binaries can be replaced later to manipulate a lot (and that the toolkit provides tools for that, together with the external resource decompiler and the external lxlite tool).

There exist numerous tools to ease the translation. Some let one change the language on-the-fly, some use text files, some load parts of it in memory, some use EAs. All these are quite young and as above, can't affect the system tools. The diversity will remain.

My favorite is .TMF (Text Message File), invented by Christian, rewritten by Ulrich. The source remains plain text and to speed searching up, an index is built. Ulrich's variant is good for the system extensions, like XWP, because it's being loaded into memory. For other apps, that memory should better be saved, until it will be used. But I don't like the markup syntax in .TMF files. It's sometimes hard for the human eye to find a string.

For me, the index is a must, to get reasonable performance. The Pascal apps like NewView use also text files, but without an index, at least not a permanent one. There exists also a tool from Russia that uses zipped text files, probably using a similar method.

From my side I need to practice a little bit how to create the .inf files so I can review the .ipf translation on the help file.

The IPF compiler ipfc.exe plus its files have to be installed. Therefore install any toolkit (best is the last). The IPF language is described in book\ipfref.inf.

I don't like editing IPF directly, as Alex does it. I always use a preprocessor that eases the work for me extremely. Others might have other opinions. As the co-author of HyperText/2 and the author of the compiler back from IPF to HTEXT, I always use that tool for .INF or .HLP file creation.

Has anyone created an open source C/C++ app to convert INF/HLP to something else in a source code form?

I'm still thinking about a true IPFC decompiler which would create source codesuitable for re-compilation by IPFC. This has turned out to be more diffcultthan I thought because the translation process of IPFC actually loosesinformation from the original source file (especially with table formatting,itemized lists etc.) which can only be "guessed" by some kind ofpattern-detection routines. Anybody interested in such a thing?

BTW: The only useful conversion of an INF or HLP file to anything is that of NewView. It converts to IPF, but still has some linebreak and spacing issues. All other tools are useless, regarding what I've tested.

For IPF to TXT, the best would be to convert it with HyperText/2 to HTEXT and to rework the output to strip all HTEXT commands.

BTW: The only useful conversion of an INF or HLP file to anything is that of NewView. It converts to IPF, but still has some linebreak and spacing issues. All other tools are useless, regarding what I've tested.

My experience is the same for INF and HLP.

Viperhelp does a pretty good job of converting iIPF to several other formats Supported output file types are: TXT, IPF, HTM, HTML, HHP, HPJ, RTF, H, VYD, and VYT. VYD is a VyperHelp document. VYT is VyperHelp diagnostic trace output. H is a C language header file. Use "HTM" is single file HTML and "HTML" for multi-file (frame) output.

RickCHodgin

BTW: The only useful conversion of an INF or HLP file to anything is that of NewView. It converts to IPF, but still has some linebreak and spacing issues. All other tools are useless, regarding what I've tested.

For IPF to TXT, the best would be to convert it with HyperText/2 to HTEXT and to rework the output to strip all HTEXT commands.

I have a system I've created for my CAlive compiler for its help system called SourceLight. SourceLight has a graphical presentation system that is similar to the VIEW.EXE presentation in OS/2, except with a more hyperlinked PDF-style presentation.

My goals here is to scrape the os2.h and related files, and then some Borland C++ for OS/2 documentation related to those functions on OS/2 Programming, for personal use in development. I will make the tools available once I get them completed and working in OS/2.

As I have written before, I've been volunteering to translate ArcaOS into German, Swedish and Finnish. I became a member of the ArcaOS translation team some while ago and have translated a few lines into Finnish, German and Swedish. I've been quite busy lately with a variety of projects and my work so I haven't had the time for translating OS/2. The main focus of the translation team has been on German which is the most difficult of the languages I know. So, I haven't done much for the project lately. It takes a lot of time to check and double-check that there's no mistakes in grammar etc in my German translations. I'm very sorry for my absence and I'll do my best to help out when I just could find the time...

Finnish is my native language and Swedish is the the other official language here in Finland and that's why those two are the easiest ones for me. I like the German language a lot and I used to be quite fluent with it 10-15 years ago but at the moment my German is a bit a bit rusted and that's why it takes a lot of time for me to translate into it. I've only used OS/2 Warp Finnish and English language versions and the German OS/2 jargon is also not so familiar and that brings also it's own challenge. But I like challenges and as I promised, I'll get back on the translating as soon as I'll have the time. It really would be great to have a finished German translation when ArcaOS 5.1 comes out.